Movie review: ‘Hellboy’ reboot isn’t up to del Toro standards

Ed Symkus More Content Now

Wednesday

Apr 10, 2019 at 7:00 PM

After the terrific “Hellboy” in 2004 and its almost-terrific follow-up “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” in 2008, was a reboot of the series needed? Knowing that a “Hellboy 3” was in the pipeline, and was once again going to star Ron Perlman and be directed by Guillermo del Toro - just like the first two films - was it necessary to instead make a new one from scratch, featuring David Harbour in the lead and directed by horror-action man Neil Marshall?

Well, sure. Why not. This new one, presented as if those other films never existed and except for two main characters and a brief flashback origin sequence, has nothing to do with either of those films, doesn’t have the panache of del Toro’s flamboyant touch, but it works, in entertaining style, as a wild, funny, sometimes overly violent, sometimes overlong comic book of a movie.

And it covers a lot of ground, beginning in the year 517, a time, we’re told in voiceover, of man going up against creatures of darkness. A time when King Arthur and Merlin attempt to vanquish the evil sorceress Nimue (Milla Jovovich), slicing her body into pieces, putting the parts in separate boxes, and burying them all over the world.

A jump up to present time has heroic Hellboy - bright red skin, gigantic right hand, filed-down horns, a long tail - traveling to Tijuana as a representative of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (B.P.R.D.), on assignment to rescue Agent Ruiz who, posing as a lucha libre wrestler, has, let’s say ... changed from the last time he worked with Hellboy. Amidst the snarky, hip, fun dialogue and line delivery from our hero, things, as they are wont to do in these Dark Horse comic book stories, go wrong.

They get much worse after Hellboy returns to bureau headquarters in Colorado where his “father” Professor Broom (Ian McShane) runs the operation, and word gets out that Nimue - let’s just refer to her as the Blood Queen - is getting ready to destroy the world. But first, there’s the matter of an occult society in Great Britain that needs B.P.R.D.’s assistance in vanquishing a trio of bloodthirsty giants who are dining on the English populace.

There’s seldom a quiet moment in this film. Those giants are dealt with in a cartoonishly violent way involving a very large sword. Without taking a breath, the film moves on to an assault on the remote St. Sebastian’s Abbey, where religious men under a vow of silence are brutally attacked by a human-like warthog creature who is on a mission to gather up all of those buried boxes with the Blood Queen’s body parts. The intention, of course, is to sew her back together so she can once again wreak havoc upon humanity.

It would have been relatively simple to craft a story of Hellboy preventing such a thing, but there’s nothing simple here. A flashback to our hero’s creation - in a scene right out of the original film, involving Nazis, Rasputin, and documenatarian Leni Riefenstahl - leads to Hellboy having second thoughts about his relationship with his “dad.” It’s later revealed that Hellboy, a big lug who moves around with inexplicable elegance, isn’t exactly invincible, but he sure is resilient and always puts up a heck of a fight (and there are many fights). There are also other characters, each with their own set of odd circumstances. Alice Monaghan (Sasha Lane) is a spirit medium who keeps “seeing” things she doesn’t want to see. Major Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim) has bad memories of battles as well as a feline problem. There’s also the case of the demonic Baba Yaga (Emma Tate), the most hideous of the film’s weird creatures. Hold on! Remember that both King Arthur and Merlin make appearances? So, no surprise, does the great sword Excalibur.

On and on this goes, with layer upon layer of stories and characters, leading up to fight scenes galore, some of them done up in an onslaught of gory visual effects, all of them with tongue mostly in cheek. It’s accompanied by lively performances from Harbour, McShane, and Jovovich, and it’s capped off by, as has come to be expected in comic book movies, an ending, then another ending, and then another.

Ed Symkus writes about movies for More Content Now. He can be reached at esymkus@rcn.com.